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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack Spencer Jr" data-source="post: 1889163" data-attributes="member: 22006">A reasonable question.Two things are wrong with the let's pretend analogy. One is for the purpose of this thread. The other is wider in application. (can I possibly sound more pretentious? Great gravy!)First, giving the let's pretend analogy as an answer here is not helpful to my goal here. I had said I wanted to test the non-d20 waters, as it were, and answers to this question are to provide insight for how people think. If someone were to say, for example, that roleplaying is an activity were you enter a fantasy world and can take on the roles of a mighty warrior or a powerful mage (etc, etc) and go fight monsters (etc, etc), then we would know this person pretty much thinks D&D is roleplaying, or that this person does not think enough about roleplaying to separate the fantasy genre conventions fron their answer.But, an swer using the let's pretend analogy tells me very little because this has been used in the "What is Roleplaying?" section of many, many games and it is as likely as not that a person is just parroting this answer and is not giving us any insight at all.Which brings me to the second reason, which is the let's pretend analogy is a good example of knowledge without understanding. Someone parroting the let's pretend analogy from some game book usually has trouble elaborating when asked "and what does that mean?" Often they get defensive and start attacking me because I am just being dense and of course I know what it means to play let's pretend. I played it as a child. And so on.I've run into (and demonstrated, unfortunately) this sort of thing all the time and not just the let's pretend analogy, either. I once had a chat in IRC with a nice fellow making his own homebrewed RPG. He had a list of traits he wanted his game to have. (I don't recall off-hand what the list was, so I'll make up an example) One of the traits was "intuitive." I said, "Splended. What does that mean?" He guffawed a bit and finally said, "I'm not sure."It is interesting to be able to corner people so easily simply by saying: "What you just said, what does it mean?" Interesting, but ultimately frustrating.And since it has, in my view, a high chance of, well, the above, I figured it would be best to remove it from the equation.The Forge is a whole different ball of sour earwax that I would rather not go into in public. I suppose that if you're burning with curiousity, you can PM me about it.</blockquote>

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